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Thirteen years ago, it felt like I was in a front-row seat on the express train to Crazy Town. That, you will recall, is when the wheels began to come off the Bush administration's argument for invading Iraq, i.e., to find the weapons of mass destruction. But of course, there were no such weapons, an inconvenient truth to which Team Bush responded with a new, after-the-fact rationale. Now, the argument for war was and always had been the need to free the poor, suffering Iraqi people.

By itself, this steaming load of cattle waste and the smarmy self-righteousness with which it was dumped was enough to make me wander the streets muttering to myself. But what really made my brain simmer in its own juices, what really made the steam build inside my skull, was the way the American people responded to the tacit assumption that we were a bunch of compliant dopes too stupid to care that we had been baited and switched into the biggest foreign-policy debacle of the last 40 years.

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Although there are many memorable moments from Jon Stewart's reign at 'The Daily Show,' here are just a few of his funniest, most intense and even sometimes sad segments.

America shrugged, better than half of us telling pollsters the war was justified whether WMDs were found or not.

It made me want to holler.

Then my friend Bruce tells me about this news parody program called The Daily Show, hosted by this guy named Jon Stewart and says I really ought to watch. So I do. And I feel encroaching insanity rolling back, borne off on the simple, soul-saving realization that somebody else "gets it."

Jon Stewart is why I'm not crazy. With his recent announcement that he will be leaving the show this year, I figure now is the time for a thank-you long overdue.

No, Stewart did not invent fake news. Saturday Night Live got there decades before him with its Weekend Update segment. But where SNL and others approached the news with ironic detachment, Stewart alone climbed into the pit and wrestled with it.

Though his worldview was unabashedly liberal, Stewart's only true loyalty was to his own everyman sense of right and wrong. He rendered the financial meltdown comprehensible. He skewered Fox with its own words and CNN with its own holograms.